Long after the Incredible Hulk television series had ended, NBC revived the Hulk with a string of comparably silly made-for-TV movies, the first of which was, naturally, The Incredible Hulk Returns. Still a lonely soul, Bruce Banner (Bill Bixby) is on the verge of finishing a project that he believes will cure him of his unfortunate Hulk-outs. But just when he’s about to fire up the machine and change his life for the better, he’s interrupted by some curly haired nerd from his past, who tells him of a polar expedition he recently undertook, where he found an ancient hammer that allows him to summon Thor (Eric Kramer). Got that?

Why would this dork think to track down the presumed-dead Banner to tell him all this? Never you mind, because he shows Banner a demo, and sure enough, here comes Thor (looking less like Thor than Vincent D’Onofrio’s car mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting), who proceeds the wreck the shit outta Banner’s anti-Hulk contraption. Oh, the irony!

Thor doesn’t even really act like the Thor of the comics. He acts like Fabio after a week’s training of Hooked on Phonics. Posing and winking like a pro wrestler, he walks around shirtless, downs gallons and gallons of beer, and greets visitors to Banner’s apartment by asking, “Why must you pound on my door with such insolence?” This is where you know director Nicholas Corea wanted to hit the button on the mixing console marked “LAFF TRACK.”

It just sorta ends after the climactic scene of the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) and Thor working together to pull down a helicopter. Then Banner hits the road again, only to resurface in the following year’s misleadingly titled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Bangkok, Oriental city, and the city don’t know what the city is getting: Nicolas Cage with a lifetime supply of the inkiest shades of Just for Men.

In the ridiculous action failure Bangkok Dangerous, the Pang Brothers (The Eye, The Messengers) remake their own supposedly popular 1999 Thai hit of the same name, but to no great effect. So unimaginative, so uninvolving is this routine no-effort that it took me several months of starts and stops just to get through it, and even then, I gave up with about 20 minutes left to go.

Cage is Joe, one of those expert hit men of the movies: He doesn’t miss, but he’s getting too old for this shit. Instead of killing strangers on a freelance basis, he wants to meet someone and settle down. While on assignment in Bangkok, Joe meets Fon (Charlie Yeung, New Police Story), a nice deaf girl who works at the local pharmacy. He teaches her skills she needs to know, like hand-to-hand combat and watermelon shooting; in turn, she teaches him skills he needs to know, like how to feed bananas to an elephant and how to upstage an Academy Award winner without saying a word.

The only reason to watch a film like Bangkok Dangerous in the first place is obvious: potential for cool action sequences. The Pang (Pain?) Brothers deliver a decent boat chase and murder by motorcycle, but no scene is pulled off with a discernible degree of pizazz. It may be the least engaging action vehicle for an A-list actor this decade. If only the sibs had borrowed elements of one of Cage’s other turds of the time, The Wicker Man, they might have something.

I’d suggest the bee helmet. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

I’d like to think The Black Cobra 2 is the only Fred Williamson movie in which he wears a Members Only jacket and with a preponderance of cowbell on the soundtrack, but since there’s a number in the title, I can’t be too sure.

Fred stars as Malone, a Chicago cop who gets in trouble for exploding a bad guy’s helmet-clad head like a watermelon with a single bullet, just following perhaps the longest opening credits known to man (eight minutes!). So his cantankerous, overweight police chief sends Fred to Manila to hook up with Interpol office Nicholas Hammond (several hills below The Sound of Music and, for that matter, his Spider-Man TV series). To the filmmakers’ credit, it accurately captures enough of the Philippines’ local flavor to make you never ever want to go there.

The Italian-backed actioner almost seems like two movies for the pain of one. In the first part, Fred falls for a buck-toothed, barfy faced girl whose con-man father was found murdered (“I hate to be the barrier of bad news,” Fred says; couldn’t they have dubbed that over?) and then rescues her after she’s kidnapped by slimy terrorists looking for $10,000.

Then she’s out of the picture and part two begins, with said slimy terrorists holding 350 schoolchildren hostage. Since one of them is Hammond’s short-pantsed son, Nick and Fred rub black greasepaint on their faces (well, okay, just Nick) and get all Die Hard-y as only a film like Black Cobra 2 can’t. I’d like to think they don’t show a single one of the 350 kids because of budgetary reasons, but since they didn’t bother to overdub Fred’s gaffe earlier, I can’t be too sure. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Writer/producer Roger Corman’s original The Fast and the Furious should be called The Relaxed and the Rear-Projected. In pure old-school AIP fashion, it’s quick, painless and efficient. And a better movie than the loose Vin Diesel remake from 2001.

Also pulling double duty as director, John Ireland stars as a man wanted for murder, and is given the cold-blooded killer name of Frank Webster. While on the run to Mexico, he stops at a diner and is accosted by a porky cop, so he grabs the nearest hostage he can — dish o’ ice cream Dorothy Malone — and they hightail it in her Jaguar.

She’s headed for the “international” car races, so he thinks that’d be a good place to lay low until they can get across the border. Perhaps — just perhaps — captor and captive will fall in love before 75 minutes is up.

For a delinquent type, Ireland sure does look to be in his 40s. The race sequences are antiquated, of course, but that’s what lends this drive-in movie its charm. It’s hard not to have a good time when it flies by so quickly. Bonus: No Paul Walker saying “bro.” —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Freelance thief Tommy Lee Jones is hired to steal some accounting reports from a corporation. Lucky for him, they’re marked “ACCOUNTING REPORTS” in big, block letters. Unlucky for him, he triggers the alarm during this assignment and is forced to hide the cassette in the back of the Black Moon — an experimental super-car that runs on water and hits 325 mph — during a chance meeting at a gas station.

He tracks the Black Moon to a hotel, where, unlucky for him, professional car thief Linda Hamilton steals it for boss Robert Vaughn’s chop shop, hidden in the basement of a twin high rise. Lucky for him, Hamilton’s having some issues with her boss, so she agrees to help him steal it. Unlucky for him, she also beds down with him — seriously, she kind of looks like a dude.

The fun of Black Moon Rising is all contained in the final third, with the nighttime break-in of the tower, the theft and the escape, all with cranky-puss Tommy Lee climbing through air shafts and doing donuts.

Any movie set in a high-rise at night automatically carries a cachet of cool (unless it stars Paul Reiser), but imagine how much cooler this would have been if screenwriter John Carpenter had directed it as well. This was an early Carpenter script dusted off after he hit it big, so his involvement is limited. But it’s a fairly well-crafted B-picture that knows every so often, you just gotta focus on the car. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.